In a recent brief on Republican Mark Foley, I made an inference from polls conducted soon after the congressman's departure. It was presumed that Foley's salacity and rumors of misconduct among House leaders would detract from Republican fortunes generally, but the surveys' numbers amplified very specific expectations to extremes, some of them at great logical disjuncture.
Speculation would have stopped there if the matter of unreflective polling weren't principal in serious discussions on the right. Mindful of denial in the face of adversity, several rightist commentators have found reason to be skeptical of acute swings that are based on affiliative demographics markedly favoring Democrats. This could be corroborated or contradicted by polls run internally by Republicans — Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove, who are on record as sanguine about Election Day, have no particular reason not to equivocate — but only if the samples for those polls are more veritable than the ones under suspicion. Continuity in polling this year either means unlikely accuracy or systematic failure. The Democratic Party's afflatus for electoral grievance, meanwhile, was strengthened two years ago when the interviews of voters outside precincts were believed to be more authentic than ballots themselves. What if the industry as currently practiced is nearing obsolescence?
This election has four possible outcomes. From available information, we might suppose the most probable outcome to be Republican retention of both House and Senate majorities, albeit less of one in each than before. Of lower probability would be Republican loss of one chamber, and then even lower of two. Intuitively speaking, however, the strange correspondence between what the left wants and what the polls provide is dubious. There is a contrived quality to it, so much that it shouldn't surprise if the right, not the left, landslides.